Closing of Jubilee Schools a blow to city, church, children

St. Augustine Catholic School was the first Jubilee school in Memphis. It opened in 1999, four years after it was closed for financial reasons. It and all other Jubilee schools will be closing again in 2019 for financial reasons.(Photo: File / USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee)

The first Catholic Jubilee school in Memphis opened in 1999 just as the Roman Catholic Church, on the threshold of its Third Millennium, was preparing to celebrate the Year of Jubilee in 2000.

"The century and the millennium now beginning will need to see to what length of dedication the Christian community can go in charity towards the poorest," Pope John Paul II said. "There is a special presence of Christ in the poor, and this requires the Church to make a preferential option for them."

For the next two decades, that faith-based preferential option for the poor was exercised most notably and nobly here by the Memphis Jubilee Catholic Schools, a faith-based initiative launched by former Bishop J. Terry Steib and former Catholic schools superintendent Mary McDonald.

The 11 parochial schools provided thousands of mostly low-income children in the city's most distressed neighborhoods a safe, nurturing educational environment at little or no cost, thanks to local philanthopy.

Kids wait for a ride home after school at the Catholic High School on McLean. The entire Memphis Catholic Jubilee Schools network, along with St. Michael Catholic School, will close at the end of the 2018-19 year, the Catholic Diocese of Memphis said on Tuesday.(Photo: Jim Weber/The Commercial Appeal)

Nearly all students have received tuition support. All families have paid something, but some as little as $10 a month. Students who graduated from the elementary schools have received scholarships to Catholic middle and high schools.

The schools also have provided all students who need them with uniforms, daily hot breakfasts and lunches, weekend snack packs, holiday food baskets, health screenings, and tutoring, as well as parenting workshops, and literacy and jobs skill programs.

"Memphis has become a model or inspiration for Catholic schools in other parts of the country," Dr. Karen Ristau, then president of the National Catholic Education Association, told The Commercial Appeal in 2012.

That was the year five students from the first Jubilee kindergarten class at St. Augustine Elementary School graduated from high school.

Sadly, next year will mark the eighth and final Jubilee Schools graduation. The Catholic Diocese of Memphis has announced that all Jubilee schools, including Memphis Catholic High, will close in 2019, just as Memphis is on the threshold of its third century.

The largesse of local donors, which built a $30 million endowment, just isn't enough to sustain a school system annually serving more than 1,400 mostly non-Catholic and poor students.

"Funding for the schools has been provided primarily through a trust funded by very generous donors plus annual fundraising," the diocese said in a news release Tuesday. "That trust is nearly depleted."

Diocesan officials say the schools would have been able to remain open if state legislators had approved a voucher system, allowing tax dollars to be used for private schools.

Perhaps. But the Jubilee schools were started to give low-income families in distressed neighborhoods a faith-based alternative, and, in particular, a Catholic schools alternative, to public schools. That's work for the church, not the state.

In a 2012 interview with The Commercial Appeal, the two local philanthropists who provided the initial $12 million in funding anonymously, said they were drawn to "the historic mission and excellence of the Catholic school system."

It's a shame the diocese itself never provided the Jubilee schools with a regular source of operating funds, although it did provide scholarships to Catholic middle and high schools as well as the actual school buildings.

A charter school network is expected to apply to open new schools to replace each of the closed Jubilee schools in the same locations, beginning in Fall 2019. But the new schools would be public charters, not private or parochial schools.

The first six Jubilee schools were opened in inner-city Catholic schools that had been closed for financial reasons – shifting demographics, declining enrollments and rising expenses.

"When we closed those schools, we left more than buildings behind. We left children, and those children need us now more than ever," McDonald said in 2012.

That's as true now as it was then. If the church can't find the resources to keep those schools open, let's hope public and private forces can work together to reopen those schools again.